Poetry is a form of problem solving. There are poems and performances I return to often because they speak to – but do not necessarily solve – problems I enjoy. These problems are usually on the merry-go-round that is the relationship between society and art, and some of the pieces I mention below exemplify the kinds of problems I think about. How to speak. How to sound authentic. How to speak so you are understood. The art of incantation.

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So let’s start with a light take on a heavy subject. Every few months I watch Tamarin Norwood (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjMvde0GJBk) read at an event called Minimum Security Prison Poetry, then spend a few hours admiring her website. It’s a great fusion of academia and playfulness. But listen to her voice. The facetious use of arch-formalism, the repetition, the nature of the repetition, the element of the absurd. It’s the conventional voice for this style of poetry. If she was a spoken word poet, she’d gravitate towards the American slam formula in which you start with slow declarative sentences, then speed up. But sometimes the convention works. Norwood’s piece is an example, as is another favourite: Kai Davis’s Fuck I Look Like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGdYAK2sLjA) There’s a bit of a contradiction when she says “You say gargantuan, I say big as shit”, then goes on to criticise another student for not using big words, but her performance is a seamless combination between the voice she’d actually use in an argument and that uniquely American oratory style. She affirms my suspicions that some social problems don’t need answers, they need to be cussed out.

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But what about the voice in other cultures? In 2012 I visited Angelica Mesiti’s Citizens Band, showing at ACCA in Melbourne. It featured four musicians with unique talents, but the one that impressed was the Mongolian throat singer. Later research yielded dozens of varieties, including the Tuvan version here at Ubuweb’s ethnopoetics page (http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/tuva.html). When I taught myself to do it (you can too) the idea of the technique as a “conduit” of poetry really moved me. How else is it possible to speak? What else can our voices do? And what kind of wordless poem is created?

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Speaking of wordlessness: Ng Yi Sheng’s performance of Singapore’s national pledge is a performance I don’t have a video for, but I wanted to include it because it’s a remarkable piece of mockery and exaggeration. Imagine: a slight, smiling man dressed as an air hostess gets up and places a pencil in his mouth. He then spends the next five minutes waving his hands around like a dictator, as he shouts lines from the national pledge to a marching rhythm. JUSTICE! JUSTICE! SOCIETY! The pencil makes him dribble. His movements exhaust him. This poem, when performed in front of Singaporean ministers, got him blacklisted. But as someone who has always been contemptuous of nationalism, I recall this performance as a great union of politics and performance. Conclusion: the more humourless the target of the joke, the better the joke.

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Sometimes the joke is hard to get. Tongues Untied (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWuPLxMBjM8), a 1989 film by Marlon Riggs, is the nuanced pursuit of a unified sexual/racial aesthetic. His voice, his desire to be seen as he is – dark-skinned, black, American – is complicated by his sexuality; it leads him into the white world, makes him vulnerable – neither this nor that. Yet like Norwood, there’s a lightness to his touch, and I admire the unity of his vision. Why does two identities imply a split? Why isn’t the person doubled or squared? It’s a problem that Riggs sets to song, and I return to this long, cinematic poem every year.

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What Riggs also touches on is the yearning to say as an adult what you needed to hear as a young person; and sometimes that thing can be said not in words, but in the simple combination of *that* person, *that* voice, *that* context. Which is why Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (http://vimeo.com/11997033) in conversation with Ellery Russian about queer crip sexuality is one of my favourite videos. The humanity in what they are saying is simple and elegant, and the same could be said generally of Samarasinha’s poetry. She writes a lot about her father’s past and how it was a mystery she had to become queer to solve. Sometimes I want the voice that wrote the poems to talk simply, humanely and intelligently about the world at large, and that is what she does here.

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ZP Editor’s Note: To read poems by Jay Bernard, click on April 2012 and hers are right at the top.